It’s easy to feel overwhelmed in the face of climate change and the worsening state of the environment, and to feel despair at the dangerous mess that nations and corporations have made in the ruthless pursuit of capital, growth and cheap power.

As good citizens, we try to reduce our emissions by getting solar panels, limiting air travel or investing money responsibly, but the solutions to these wicked problems are structural and can feel beyond the power of the individual.

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Yet in this week’s election, ordinary Australians have the chance to cast a vote that will have enormous consequences for this urgent issue. This is the critical decade for action on climate change. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says global emissions must be halved by 2030 to have any hope of limiting global warming to, or close to, 1.5 degrees. We must act.

Disillusioned voters often resort to the truism that “both sides are as bad as each other”. But let’s be clear – in this election, the climate and environment policies of the two major parties are very different, even if neither goes far enough.

The Coalition has stuck like a barnacle to its carbon emissions target of a 26 per cent decrease by 2030 (on 2005 levels), and in the eleventh hour before the Glasgow climate meeting, it signed on to net zero by 2050. This makes Australia’s target the weakest among all developed countries and is consistent with catastrophic global warming of 3 degrees globally, bordering on 4 degrees.

The Coalition’s emission reduction plan leans heavily on “technology breakthroughs” such as investment in “clean” hydrogen, energy storage and carbon capture and storage (CCS), even though CCS technology has never worked anywhere in the world at scale.

Despite spruiking its economic credentials, the Coalition has failed to capitalise on the opportunity to make Australia a renewable energy powerhouse. There is no national energy or transition plan, and progress has been led by the states (of both political stripes). With its wealth of solar and wind resources, Australia should be leading this race, not trying to catch up.

If the Earth is to stay within dangerous global heating limits, no new oil and gas fields or coal-fired power stations can be created, says the International Energy Agency (IEA). Yet during the election, the Coalition has pledged hundreds of millions of dollars to emission-intensive fossil fuel industries. The spending on this is far greater than the Coalition’s commitments for clean energy projects.

How does Labor compare? It has an emissions reduction goal of 43 per cent by 2030, which is less than the 45 per cent cut promised ahead of the last election and shows how that electoral loss cruelled the party’s climate ambition. This goal is consistent with 2 degrees of warming globally and is not what climate scientists tell us is needed: University of Melbourne modelling found Australia’s “fair share” of the global emissions budget to stay within 1.5 degrees would require a 75 per cent emissions reduction by 2030, with net zero by 2035.